Financial institutions, such as investment banks, buy loans and loan portfolios from banks or loan originators primarily to securitize the loans into bonds and then sell the bonds to investors. These bonds are considered asset-backed securities as they are collateralized by the assets of the loans. Many types of loans can be securitized into bonds, including residential mortgages, commercial mortgages, automobile loans, and credit card receivables.
A variety of bond structures can be created from a population of loans, each structure having characteristics and constraints that need to be accounted for in order to maximize the profit that a financial institution can realize by securitizing the loans into bonds. The optimal grouping or pooling of loans into bonds for a given bond structure and a given loan population can depend on the characteristics of each loan in the population. Furthermore, the bond pool or execution coupon that an individual loan executes into can depend on the bond pool or best execution of each other loan in the population. As the typical loan population considered for securitizing into bonds is very large (e.g. 10,000 loans or more), determining an optimal pooling of loans for securitizing into bonds can be challenging.
Accordingly, what is needed are systems and methods for optimizing the packaging of a population of loans into bonds for a given bond structure.